


Alpha in Tauris

by statler



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 08:04:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3283031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statler/pseuds/statler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life after wartime for Gale Hawthorne.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alpha in Tauris

Five years after the installation of Panem’s new government, Gale quits his job in District 2.

The pay is good — too good, really — more than he knows what to do with. He gives most of it away. To his mother, to his brothers and sister, to the relief organizations that form to feed the refugees and rebuild the Districts.

The rest he uses to build a cabin deep in the forests of District 7, far from the Panem he fought so hard to build. He is proud of the changes that have been made, but the new world is not his own. The woods of 7 are thick and peaceful — not as old or wild as the woods of home, but they will do.

When he finally returns to the rock he used to share — and of course he does return, because the only force in the world that had ever kept him away was his own — he is 34, a year older than his father was when the mine collapsed, and much, much older than he ever believed he’d become.

She is not there, and Gale is glad. He prefers to think that she does not visit the woods anymore, that she has found happiness in her own life and no longer has to look for it on the other side of an electric fence.

Just in case, though… just in case, he waits to pull the trigger until he is back in 7, far, far away from the rock he’d once shared and the woods they called home.


End file.
